The Roman Theater at Taormina

1828

Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont

Painter, French, 1790 - 1870

Against a backdrop of stone ruins and rocky mountains, two men wearing long, brown robes address a young boy in this sunlit landscape painting. The people are tiny in scale in relation to the landscape, and they have pale skin. Each man has a bald head surrounded by a ring of hair. They stand in the lower center of the painting on a grassy area that runs alongside a curving stone wall set into the earth. The wall begins near the left edge of the painting and curves toward us, in a shallow U, and extends off the right side. The men are turned to our right with hands outstretched, and they face the boy who holds a hand to his head. The land dips away from us to meet the stone ruins in a shallow valley. The curving wall and ruins are honey brown. The edge of a rust-brown, rocky cliff juts into the scene to our left, and to our right, a steel-gray mountain rises steeply just beyond the ruins. More buildings, these intact, cluster along a cliff-face that overlooks a coastline with ice-blue water. Smoke pours from a snow-tipped mountain in the distance, to our right of center. The mountain’s sloping sides are mottled in sky blue and taupe brown. Parchment-white clouds line the horizon beyond the mountain under a pale blue sky. The artist signed and dated the lower left, “LS 1828,” with the LS joined in a monogram.

Media Options

This object’s media is free and in the public domain. Read our full Open Access policy for images.

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on paper on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp

  • Dimensions

    overall: 43.2 x 59.7 cm (17 x 23 1/2 in.)
    framed: 55.9 x 71.8 x 5.1 cm (22 x 28 1/4 x 2 in.)

  • Accession

    2004.166.33


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

(James Mackinnon, London); purchased September 1999 by Frank Anderson Trapp [1922-2005], Pittsburgh; gift 2004 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1999

  • Land, Sea and Sky, 1770-1870, James Mackinnon (London) at W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, 1999, no. 12, repro.

2020

  • True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2020 - 2022, no. 49, repro.(shown only in Washington and Cambridge).

Inscriptions

lower left in monogram: LS 1828

Wikidata ID

Q20185648


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